Agribusiness — Farming engaged in as a large-scale business operation embracing the production, processing, and distribution of agricultural products and the manufacture of farm machinery, equipment, and supplies.

Climate — The accumulation of daily and seasonal weather events over a long period of time.Click here for information about the climate of North Carolina.

Convection — Heat transfer in which mass is exchanged. A net movement of mass may occur, but more commonly parcels with different energy amounts change places, so that energy is exchanged without a net movement in mass.

Coriolis force — An apparant force which acts solely from the earth's rotation to deflect parcels or objects. It is a function of latitude and speed of object.

Degree days — A unit used in estimating fuel requirements for heating a building.

Disaster mitigation — Process of lessening the impacts of disasters.

Drought — A period of abnormally dry weather sufficiently long enough to cause serious effects on agriculture and other activities in the affected area.Click here for information about drought in North Carolina.

El Niño — An extensive ocean warming that begins along the coast of Peru and Ecuador. Major El Niño events occur once every 3 to 7 years as a current of nutrient-poor tropical water moves southward along the west coast of South America.Click here for information about El Niño.

Energy balance — A condition in which the energy budget is balanced; the system neither gains nor loses energy.

Energy budget — Measure of energy entering and leaving a system, such as Earth's climate system.

Percentile — The rank of a particular value, in a dataset, on a percentage scale from 1 to 99, where the 1st percentile represents the lowest value (minimum), and the 99th percentile represents the highest value (maximum).

Photosynthetically active radiation — Specific spectrum of so radiation used by plants in the photosynthesis process.

Season — Expressed in terms of the declination angle of the sun, which is the latitude of the point on the surface of the Earth directly under the sun at noon.

Solar Radiation — Total radiation from the sun.

Storm surge — An abnormal rise of several meters in the ocean level. It is produced by the combination of high water and high winds.

Streamflow — A measure of the volume of water that flows past a given point in a river or steam, recorded in cubic-feet per second. Another name for streamflow is discharge. Peak streamflow refers to the highest instantaneous streamflow measurement for a given year.

Temperature inversion — A region of negative lapse rate where the temperature increases with altitude.

Thermohaline circulation — In the ocean, when temperature and salinity act together. It is a vertical circulation induced by surface cooling, which causes convective overturning.

Topography — The natural and manmade features and relief of Earth's surface.

Tornado — An intense, rotating column of air that protrudes from a cumulonimbus cloud in the shape of a funnel or a rope whose circulation is present on the ground.Click here for information about tornadoes in North Carolina.